FEMA Union Sends Shot Across the Bow

Problems with the functioning of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have been on my mind – and many others – mind since the debacle of their response to Hurricane Katrina. There was no question that FEMA failed miserably in their response to that devastating event.  Since 2005, there have been numerous action reports, debates, opinion pieces as well as Congressional action discussing what needed to be done to fix FEMA. In the waning days of the Bush Administration, some of the talk has been about how President Obama is inheriting a much improved FEMA that responded better to this past year’s crop of hurricanes and floods.

A ninety-one (91) page memo (download) from the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) which represents some 400 FEMA employees says otherwise. The following are some excerpts from the Executive Summary of the report entitled “Shattering the Illusion of FEMA’s Progress: Ten Recommendations for Rebuilding a Broken Agency:”

“The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was created in 1979 to help protect American lives and property from the consequences of all emergencies and disasters. During the 1990s, under the leadership of James Lee Witt, FEMA evolved to become a model Government agency with high employee morale and a strong sense of mission.

But since 2001, FEMA has been on a downward spiral, due initially to cuts in mitigation and other effective programs…… and to corresponding policy and resource shifts toward the department’s focus on security. The heavy departmental shift toward terrorism prevention and security, and the corresponding and misplaced agency reliance on defense and military expertise, detracts from FEMA’s critical mission to coordinate the national response to a disaster – in partnership with other Federal agencies, State and local governments, and the non-government sector – when security efforts fail, or when natural disaster strikes.

In the three years since Hurricane Katrina, FEMA’s public relations efforts have pushed the story that the agency has learned from its mistakes, telling the public that the agency has been improving coordination, adding leadership, and recruiting talent to successfully support numerous disasters since those fateful days in the late summer of 2005. The harsh truth is that the disasters FEMA has supported in recent years are basically mid-level disasters, and not large-scale catastrophes on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or the 9/11 attacks…

This is an agency still suffering from……a systemic failure across the agency to integrate proven principles and concepts of emergency and incident management into programs and operations.

FEMA today is running in circles. Preparedness activities are not based on the principles and concepts of incident management, and do not serve to integrate exercises, training, and planning across the agency and across the Federal, State, tribal, and local spheres…..The National Response Framework (NRF) that has been put into place does not provide a useful operational plan for coordinating a national response to any disaster, let alone an effective response to a catastrophic situation. FEMA itself does not follow the principles and concepts of the National Incident Management System (NIMS) that the agency is required to develop and implement nationally and that should provide a framework for the majority of its activities”

I don’t necessarily agree with everything in the document, but it is important for everyone who is interested in this area to hear what the folks on the inside are saying. The memo provides ten recommendations for revitalizing FEMA. Of the ten I will only offer an opinion on two of them. They are:

9. “Build an agency strategy and organization based on the principles and concepts of the National Incident Management System (NIMS).” I wholeheartedly agree.

10. “Pursue the removal of FEMA from the Department of Homeland Security.” Here, I completely disagree.

I will provide my reasons in future blogs.